Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

It’s usually taken as read that an accountancy job is a job for life but these days that’s no longer the case and that there is such a thing a specialist accountancy recruitment agency should be no surprise to anyone.

The particular difficult with accountants is that there can frequently be tie-in, no-competition and no conflict of interest terms in their employment contract. So, it’s not quite so easy to move jobs or to find a new accountancy job even in normal times as it is with “normal” jobs and, of course, these are far from normal times so it’s that much more difficult these days.

That said, if you’re searching for, say, “accountant jobs Edinburgh” you will find jobs around with some of those at quite surprisingly high levels. What you will see though, courtesy of the contract restrictions above and, of course, non-disclosure that there’s very little meat to the job descriptions and you’ll usually need to formally contact the employment agency to find out more should you be attracted to one of those on offer. In many ways that’s something of a nuisance but unfortunately it’s something that isn’t easily avoided.

So, if you fancy being a qualified accountant in Edinburgh there are definitely possibilities, just allow for needing to contact the agency rather than relying on information on the website listings.

In eras of normal economic activity there are always rumours that come true. That interest rates will fall (or rise), that the chancellor is on his way out (or not) and so on. However, it’s more of a problem in times like these.

For example, the West Bromwich building society was rumoured to be about to need a rescue package back in May. In fact, that hasn’t happened and may never happen, yet I’m quite sure that more than a few depositors with the society withdrew cash whilst other potential depositors probably decided on a different building society. So far that’s been “a few” depositors or potential depositors but it could very easily become a tide and fell the society just as happened with the Northern Rock.

And yet, we also get rumours in the other direction. Thus the markets don’t seem in such dire straits lately as they were not so long ago. The flow of companies announcing bankruptcies seems to be slowing (no substantial companies for a while now) and even the housing market may be in the first stages of an upturn.

The problem isn’t the rumours as such but rather that in dire economic times the effect of such rumours tends to be much more extreme than would normally be the case. That’s, of course, why the government tend to be somewhat more reluctant to say anything as it’s extremely easy for an off the cuff comment to be perceived as negative these days. Still, we’re sure to have a new government soon, aren’t we? Or is that just a rumour too?

With the world economy falling apart around us this is one of those times where many people wish that they had invested in gold as, of course, with everything else falling gold is doing quite nicely as usual.

The key thing is to keep your savings and investments diversified and moreover to keep to a regular savings and investment programme. If you’re doing that, it shouldn’t really matter whether the price of gold is sitting around the $200 mark or if it’s sitting at the $900 mark since, as with all investments, it’s pretty much impossible to hit the bottom of the market when you’re buying and it’s equally difficult to hit the top when you’re selling. That said, the gold price is currently off the top achieved in May.

But if you’ve decided to buy some gold bullion for a rainy day, how do you go about it? In principle there are all kinds of investment schemes around these days which let you buy a share in a pile of gold and that’s a sensible way to go about it in that the costs are lower than they are if you some gold bars. However, that lower cost comes at a price, namely that you’re trusting that some intermediary actually has that piece of gold for you and that, should they go bankrupt, that you’ll be able to get your little piece of gold. Certainly these firms have all kinds of reassuring things to say about that but at the end of the day, to my mind, there’s nothing to beat having a lump of gold in your hand.

If you’re aiming at looking after the gold yourself it’s relatively easy to buy it these days by way of Bullion by Post who offer the usual range of investment sizes of gold bars. In terms of bars, the smallest that you can get is the one ounce bar which weighs in at around £600 these days (the price varies throughout the day) or you can get the one kilo bars that you see in photos of Fort Knox and the like for around £19000. The larger bars carry less of a premium over the spot price for gold (ie they are cheaper per ounce of gold) but unless your portfolio is really large the larger bars aren’t going to be terribly practical purchases for you.

One thing to bear in mind if you’re collecting these things in your house is the security and insurance aspect. Clearly if you are stockpiling gold in your house you’re building up a major asset and your insurance company would want to see it adequately protected. It’s possible to avoid this hassle by using a safety deposit box in your bank which will save on the insurance and you may be able to get it free too depending on your bank.

Sounds an easy solution to the pornography issue for sure although it obviously doesn’t solve the abuse angle in this case.

However, there’s a problem with this approach. For one thing it’s a child safety measure yet many parents give their children phones for child safety too and these days most phones come with cameras. Is eliminating the possibility of inappropriate photos more important than knowing that your kids can call you for help? Given the relative rarity of these cases I suspect that being able to call is probably more important.

OK, so let’s just make photos of naked children illegal then. That’s easy, isn’t it? Not really because for one thing you’d need to arrest all the paedeatric doctors as, of course, they have textbooks containing photos of children, some of whom are naked. OK, so we can make an exception for doctors then. Well, I’m currently doing a child development course and next year will be doing one on human biology. Are you going to arrest students for having photos of children? Then there are the parents who drag out the cute photos of their little girl or boy in the bath and I’m sure that most parents have such photos these days. Finally, there’s the relatively new phenomena of sexting to consider. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for it to be illegal to take a photo of yourself, regardless of what age you might be at the time.

How many more exceptions will you need to make?

What we need to remember in all this is that it’s not the photos per se that are the issue. It’s the people who “get off” on seeing inappropriate photos of children and for them the Mothercare catalogue is their equivalent of Playboy.

The problem with really high profile cases such as Vanessa George’s seems likely to be is that the very high level of publically expressed opinions can mean that the court case can be thrown out.

To avoid that what usually happens is that a reporting restriction is invoked whereby it’s deemed to be in contempt of court to publish specific information about the case in advance of a verdict being announced. That system worked really well in pre-internet days but is increasingly unworkable in the Internet age as I’ve said before. As it stands right now there don’t appear to be any reporting restrictions in place for this particular case which has had the effect that it’s been talked about on TV, radio, newspapers and, of course, blogs and 99% of what’s been said is very much along the lines of “let’s lynch her now” as you’d probably expect.

However, there’s also the not so small matter that she hasn’t been convicted yet so is rechnically innocent of the charges at the moment. That’s as it should be, of course, since the whole British legal system is built on the premise that people are considered until a case is proven against them. You might think that with all the public outrage that she couldn’t possibly be truly innocent of all those things that she’s been charged with but it does happen. After all, people have been arrested for taking photos of their own children before now and they’re generally laughed at when they reach the courtroom.

The vast majority of people have only heard, at best, second hand reports of the charges. They haven’t even heard second hand accounts of the evidence. Don’t forget that the grandmother I referred to above was charged with producing pornography yet it turned out she was doing nothing of the sort when the evidence was examined.

Are you still prepared to say that Vanessa George is guilty having merely heard an account of the charges against her?